In Congress, Growing Doubts on Spending Process

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: November 24, 2004

The power of the purse has always been the ultimate power of Congress. But the way Congress is exercising that power is causing a ruckus on Capitol Hill, where members of both parties say the system for financing the government is broken.

This year, for the third year in a row, lawmakers delayed passing spending bills until the very last minute, then rolled most of them into a catchall measure called an omnibus. This year's bill, which passed Saturday night, was a 3,300-page legislative behemoth -- stuffed with special projects for lawmakers and an embarrassing provision that would have allowed Congressional aides to examine citizens' tax returns -- delivered to lawmakers just hours before they voted on it.

Many confessed they had not read it.

''We've reached the bizarre point where we approve hundreds of billions of dollars of bills without anyone seeing them,'' Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview Tuesday. ''And then we're shocked -- shocked! -- that a provision should sneak in which is onerous.''

On Tuesday, with lawmakers still in a dither over the tax-return provision, the spending bill encountered yet another delay in its tortured journey to President Bush's desk. Though the Senate, whose members say they were unaware of the language on tax returns, has approved a resolution stripping it from the bill, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, refused to allow the House to do so without formal debate.

''The assault on taxpayer privacy was not a simple mistake, and Democrats will not let Republicans sweep it under the rug,'' Ms. Pelosi said.

She called provision ''a Saturday night massacre on Americans' privacy.'' In holding up the bill, Ms. Pelosi said she was seeking a promise from Republicans not to bring legislation to the floor so hastily in the future.

Her objection means the House must reconvene on Dec. 6 to take up the Senate resolution. If it is approved, as expected, the $388 billion omnibus, which includes nine separate bills and covers spending for myriad government agencies, can go to the White House, more than two months after the fiscal year started.

A spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, John Feehery, said Ms. Pelosi was playing ''political games.''

In the meantime, Congress is expected to give routine approval on Wednesday to a measure continuing government spending at current levels until Dec. 8, a move that is necessary to avoid a government shutdown of the sort that occurred in 1995 when Bill Clinton was president.

Though the parties are bickering about the omnibus, both sides agree that the process that produced it is in tatters. Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who has served on the Appropriations Committee for his entire 46 years in the Senate, found the measure, which was passed on his 87th birthday, so odious that he voted against it.

''We have seen within these last few years, especially, this excrescence of the body politic grow until now it has become malignant,'' Mr. Byrd said, calling it ''a disgrace upon the escutcheon of the Senate.''

The problem with an omnibus, lawmakers and independent analysts agree, is that it creates an opportunity for what Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called ''legislative mischief.'' Others call it pork, and this year's bill is chock full of it. The measure will send taxpayer dollars all over the country, from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to a homeless shelter in Hawaii.

Passing spending bills is one of the few jobs that lawmakers can trace directly to the Constitution, which does not permit the president to spend money unless Congress approves. Under the current system, lawmakers are responsible for passing 13 separate spending bills each year. But in recent years, the Senate especially has been unable to complete its appropriations work.

This year, for instance, the House passed 12 of the 13 appropriations bills but the Senate passed only 4. Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, blamed the Senate for failing to adopt a budget resolution, which helps guide the appropriations process.

Mr. Byrd said ''it was never that way in the old times.''

Mr. Reischauer says appropriations bills were less contentious in the past, when one party or the other had a large majority in the Senate and deficits were not the problem they are today.

''It's a lot easier to pass an appropriations bill,'' he said, ''when the bottom line is going up 10 percent than when the bottom line is going up less than inflation. Then what you're really doing is voting to distribute pain, rather than handing out pleasure.''

At the same time, there is no public clamor for passing spending bills; the process is so arcane that almost nobody understands it. And Congress has a tradition of procrastinating. In the 1800's, said Donald A. Ritchie, the associate Senate historian, lawmakers would debate appropriations past midnight on the night of adjournment, and instruct Senate doorkeeper ''to stand on the chair with a broom handle and turn the hands of the clock back to give them more time to debate.''

But the recent delays trouble Senator Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican in line to become chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He said Tuesday that the appropriations process was ''in need of reform'' and that overhauling it would be one of his panel's priorities when the new Congress convened in January.

''It's very much on my mind,'' Mr. Cochran said.

He said he had several proposals, but declined to discuss specifics. Asked if he had read the omnibus bill in its entirety, Mr. Cochran laughed, and then paused for a long time.